In the following essay, Vaughan employs Hasidic tales to come to an understanding of Kafka's parable “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft.”

Das stärkste Mittel, auf die himmlischen

Sphären einzuwirken, ist das Gebet.

Alexander Eliasberg1

Schreiben als Form des Gebets

Franz Kafka2

Faith was fire [for the Ba'al Shem Tov], not sediment.

Abraham Joshua Heschel3

I am undertaking the illumination of Kafka's “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft,”4 suggesting shared elements with the Hasidic tales of Alexander Eliasberg's collection, Sagen polnischer Juden,5 that Kafka held in his library and that evinced “Gebrauchsspuren,”6; and also particularly elements shared with and disparate to a parable and tales from Martine Buber's two collections, Die...